The Ecosystem of Google Technologies

By Sumit Baluja, Vice President, Tech Mahindra

Sumit Baluja, Vice President, Tech Mahindra

Eric Schimdt, executive chairman of Google commented, “Between the birth of the world and 2003, there were five exabytes of information created. We now create five exabytes every two days. See why it's so painful to operate in information markets? Another revolution taking roots in this information age is the way we work and live.

“The ecosystem of Google technologies, which deeply touch our consumer lives in the form of Search, Gmail, Maps, Android, and Browser, is uniquely positioned to transform the enterprises with similar experiences and outcomes”

This disruption is led by cutting-edge technologies that are rapidly reshaping the world around us in every possible way. Google is at the forefront of this disruptive change with its core mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.

The workplace of the future will be less centralized, highly mobile, very flexible, and will have a workforce that is habituated to use disruptive technologies. The collaborative consumption model for human capital has never been so much in demand and the need to effectively store, compute, search, collaborate, consume, and visualize digital content is ever more pressing for the enterprises. The ecosystem of Google technologies, which deeply touch our consumer lives in the form of Search, Gmail, Maps, Android, and Browser, is uniquely positioned to transform the enterprises with similar experiences and outcomes. Let’s examine how “Google for Work” suite for enterprises is leveraging its consumer-first technologies, built on world-class cloud infrastructure, to meet the stated needs.

Store: enterprises are inundated with both structured and unstructured content aka big data, which requires special handling to store and analyze. Enterprises are dumping traditional databases in favor of cloud storage and analytic tools with the ability to handle data from multiple sources from within an enterprise and outside of it user generated content on social media sites. Google Cloud Platform (GCP) with cloud storage provides dirt cheap, anytime and anywhere access to information to its employees and partners. New ways of exchanging information amongst the business partners are emerging because of this. BiqQuery, another important component of GCP, helps in analyzing big data for real-time insights with superfast speeds, multi-terabyte

datasets in seconds.

Compute: Compute power on the other hand can be used for innovation rather than just cost saving. Massive scalability and up-or-down elasticity gives businesses a whole new sandbox for testing new business ideas and growing them exponentially. Furthermore, Google provides a managed platform to develop and deploy the business logic, shielding from the complexity of underlying infrastructure thereby shifting the focus on core business. Enterprises such as Screenz use GCP to revolutionize the TV viewing experience by converting ordinary programs to live interactive events. Screenz was able to process huge numbers of votes, 100+ million interactions per minute, required for its TV show “Rising Star”. Movie studios use cloud platform to create visual effects very quickly and extremely cost effectively. Visual effects in the movie “Avataar” that took huge supercomputer-class systems hours to render just one single frame can now be rendered with much lower compute, capacity, and investment. Monte Carlo simulations for mathematical computation, gene analysis in life sciences industry, all require massive bursts in compute and are perfect examples of handling period spikes on GCP to accelerate research without Capex investments. Enterprises can not only take advantage of converting their costs from Capex to Opex, but they can also transform their business models to open newer markets.

Collaborate: Business collaboration and communication is central to GFW through Google Apps & Drive and is well known in the marketplace. Collaboration will thrive across greater social media interactions to monitor and protect a brand, a unified communications platform involving video and instant messaging across devices and finally a content sharing tool. Employees working across time zones and in real-time can quickly create, upload and share documents to help in innovation, new product development, agile customer service experience leading to improved productivity and profits.

Search: In this age of information blast, finding the right information becomes a significant challenge. In the enterprises, employees spend about 25 percent of their time looking for information and 38 percent of time in either unsuccessful searches or recreating the content. Google is delivering most powerful, convenient, and conversant functionality of Google.com search to enterprises through Google Search Appliance (GSA). GSA can be configured to give context based search, personalized results, from any data source, any device and at any location all with underlying security, simplicity and scalability. A land authority for example, managing large sets of geospatial data related to its estates, configured GSA to effectively search through land information, meta-data, geospatial data from different sources and helped users across different authorities with a unified experience.

Consume & Visualize: The expectations of end users in consuming the information is transforming too. With the spread of smart devices, and evolving business dynamics, work is expected to be accomplished from anywhere, anytime using any device. The real smartness of these devices is making the user hands-free by receiving voice and gesture based instructions. Google experience devices & platforms such as Glass, Chrome and Android can change the working environment significantly. A technician on the shop floor can receive machining and reference design instructions on a Glass interface without having to stop the work. A chain of stores can change its digital displays through centrally & remotely managed Chrome boxes to suit the local context–weather, tastes, calamity etc.

By enabling digitized information of planet earth, Google Maps has made it effortless to access the location context on the cloud. Location of an object, static or moving, in relation to the geography has become a basic necessity in personal as well as business situations. A logistics company can not only optimize their vehicle route to various delivery locations, but can also track its location real-time on a map. Similarly a retail company can over lay and visualize customer demographics on a map in order to decide their new outlet/store. Needless to say, but Uber is exploiting maps technology to the fullest.

I foresee enterprise IT strategy embracing technologies that foster inclusivity for new age workforce, focus on innovation over infrastructure and consume information effectively to make smarter decisions.